Manifesto & Journal

Manifesto Nov 2025

Objects Worth Keeping

Everything feels temporary now.

The image we see in the morning is forgotten by afternoon. The song we loved last week is replaced by another. The things we buy, watch, save, and collect pass through us faster than we can remember them.

Even ownership has become fragile.

Movies became streams. Music became access. Software became subscription. The things we think we own are rented, replaced, or made obsolete by design.

Even collecting, an act rooted in memory, obsession, and permanence, has become lighter. Faster. More disposable.

Plastic. Cardboard. Screens. Feeds. Hype cycles that vanish without leaving anything behind.

We were not always like this.

For thousands of years, human beings made objects with the intention that they would outlive them. They carved stone. They cast bronze. They built monuments for gods who no longer have names.

The object was not merely decoration. It was proof.

Proof of power. Proof of devotion. Proof that someone had taken material, skill, heat, and time, and turned it into something meant to endure.

The materials mattered.

Across civilizations that never met, humans were drawn to the same things: gold, jade, obsidian, bronze. Not only because they were beautiful, because they felt different from ordinary matter. Gold did not rust or decay. It carried the color of the sun and resisted time. Gemstones held light inside them.

These materials were difficult to find. Difficult to shape. Difficult to forget.

That difficulty gave them meaning.

And then humans did something remarkable. They stopped waiting for the earth to give them permanence, and learned to make their own. They fused copper and zinc into brass, the gold they could forge. They melted sand into glass, fired enamel onto metal, cut raw stone until it held light. The earth provided the material. Humans provided the intention.

Today, objects are made to remove difficulty. One click. One shipment. One upgrade. Consumption without effort. Ownership without ritual.

Arkaia begins from a different belief:

The world does not need more things. It needs objects worth keeping.

Objects with weight. Objects with story. Objects shaped from materials that remember pressure, heat, and human hands. Objects that feel both ancient and new.

Arkaia is not a return to the past. It is a modern collectible built on ancient instincts: permanence, rarity, symbolism, craft, and ritual.

They are made for those who still believe an object can carry meaning. For those who collect not only to own, but to discover. For those who understand that the things we keep become part of who we are.

Arkaia is for objects worth keeping.

Founder Letter Dec 2025

The Why

I've been a collector for as long as I can remember.

Pokémon cards. Yu-Gi-Oh. Warhammer 40k, assembled and painted by hand (I hated painting, I was so bad at it!). Later, gold and silver. Then Bitcoin.

I've always loved collecting. Collecting feels like discovery, progress, and an unlock all at once. You didn't just buy something. You searched for it. You traded for it. You opened the pack. You studied the details. You built the army. You completed the set. The object meant something because of what it took to find it.

I've also been a gamer my whole life. Age of Empires, Total War, World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, Halo. I spent thousands of hours in virtual worlds, earning things I cared about, gear, ranks, resources, none of which I ever truly owned.

So when NFTs arrived, they hit me instantly. Finally: real ownership of digital things. I went deep. Some of the pieces I collected, CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, Art Blocks, are still among the coolest things I own. Digital art was my gateway drug; it's what got me collecting physical art in the first place. NFTs taught me more about provenance, scarcity, community, and especially human psychology than anything before or since. But for reasons I'll write about another day, the ecosystem never quite delivered on its promise. The technology to make digital objects feel truly real doesn't exist yet.

Meanwhile, I'd spent years on the other side of the table, investing in consumer companies. Watching founders build products people genuinely love taught me what separates a product from an obsession: story, ritual, community, and craft. The best consumer companies don't sell things. They build a universe you can become a part of.

And underneath all of it runs one of my oldest obsessions: history.

I've spent years reading about everything from recent history to the most ancient civilizations. The deeper I go, the stranger it gets. Civilizations that never met reached for the same materials — gold, bronze, jade. They carved the same constellations into stone. They aligned their greatest structures to the stars with a precision we struggle to explain. And some of what they made, alloys, glass, mechanisms, monuments, took us centuries to reverse-engineer. Some of it, with all our technology, we still can't fully explain.

When I was younger, I believed in zero "woo woo" — no magic, no mysticism. I was strictly "what does the science tell us? What do the experts tell us?"

I've since come around. The world is not black and white, and I know now that there is so much exciting strangeness surrounding our past, present, and future.

I definitely don't claim to know what the ancients knew. But I'm convinced they knew things we've forgotten, and that materials, iconography, monuments, and artifacts are how they carried that knowledge across time.

And at some point, all of these threads started pulling toward a single question:

What if I could combine everything? Everything I've collected, every game I've played, every civilization I've studied, everything I've learned watching great companies get built. What would the collectible I've been chasing my whole life actually look like?

I kept arriving at the same answer.

It would be made from real materials of real value, precious metals, gemstones, enamel and more. The same materials those civilizations trusted to carry meaning across thousands of years.

It would come in a form factor I've loved since childhood: the trading card. A shape and size my hands know and love.

And it would live alongside a digital experience, a way to authenticate it, trace its history, connect with other collectors, and unlock the world behind it over time.

The weight of gold. The ritual of the pack. The world of a game.

That became Arkaia.

Not another disposable object. Not another plastic thing. Something heavier. Something stranger. Something that feels both ancient and new.

I don't think the world needs more collectibles.

I think it needs objects worth keeping.

That's why I'm building Arkaia.